Honore de Balzac

Honore de Balzac (20 May 1799-18 August 1850) was a French Legitimist novel and playwright of the 19th century.

Biography
Honore Balzac was born in Tours, France on 20 May 1799, the son of the civil servant Bernard Francois Balzac; his father adopted the noble particle de when it suited him, despite being the son of a southern French peasant. Honore became a writer during the 1820s, and he became a supporter of the absolutist Legitimists; in 1831, he adopted the noble particle de in his surname as an assertion of his contempt for the bourgeois July Revolution of 1830 and of his success as a novelist. De Balzac sought to be both a grand seigneur and a great writer, and he often fabricated his family's past in order to make it seem as if he was descended from the old Balzac d'Entragues family. While Balzac was a staunch reactionary, his works describing the plight of the working-class during the Bourbon Restoration era were some of Friedrich Engels' and Leon Trotsky's favorite works. Balzac died in Paris in 1850.